If you're looking to meet up with Perl folks in your area I suggest checking out the newly added Perl Meetup at http://perl.meetup.com. I see our own davorg has already registered there. Basically you create an account, define where you live and then subscribe to various meetups. Each city has several possible meeting places/venues for members to decide on by voting when they RSVP for the event. Events are scheduled every month. If a given city doesn't have a minimum number(I think 5) RSVP
saying they'll be in attendance, the meeting is cancelled for that city for that month.

This could be a great way to meet Perl people in your area. Check it out!

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Meetup with other Perl folks in your area (perl.meetup.com)
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Gah! What gives? Even though this has apparently just started, I see that there are 33 Java people signed up and only 9 Perl people. Fully 33% of the Perl people are from Portland :) Call this community? Sure Java programmers outnumber us, but we're family here, right?

While nowhere near as fancy, nor as useful, remember you can put yourself on the BigMonkMap on the stats pages. There are 535 people on there last time I checked.

And using this page, you can tell how far you are from other monks with distance and bearing (instructions for programming cruise missiles not included).

I've been told that the MapQuest instructions for finding your latitiude and longitude no longer work. Apparently MapQuest decided that figuring out latitude and longitude would only be useful to terrorists. I'll try and revise the instructions shortly.

Unfortunately Dave, I don't think that meetup.com has anything to offer us that we are not doing already.

I have had a bad experience with meetup.com, as I am also a noder on E2. Looking forward to meeting up with some fellow noders in London, I arranged to go to the E2 meetup scheduled for Saturday 3rd August at 5:00 pm. I turned up at the venue (Pages Bar in Victoria) (albeit 20 minutes late) to find that another group had booked the venue, and were charging an admission. I walked away and found a different pub.

Apparently there were 2 E2 noders who did find each other
having paid the admission. I have since met up with Brit noders, who seem to have quite a good grape vine. Their verdict was also a distinct thumbs down for meetup.com.

Here are my criticisms of meetup.com:

They are promising the Earth and delivering very little. Geeks of the world unite seems to be the message.

The meeting on a given subject (Perlmonks, Slashdot, Buffy, E2, etc.) is always synchronised to the same date globally. Why? IMO this means that inevitably fewer people will be available to attend.

The venue list (certainly for London at any rate) is piss poor. I have pointed the meetup.com help desk in the direction of Grub Street also saying that many of the venues I can give a personal report on as to suitability.

When it comes to venue voting, you only get a choice of a random 3. There is no "none of these" category. I did look at a homebrewers meetup for London, but they did not offer a real ale pub.

In summary: local events are best organised by local groups. Larger scale events e.g. YAPC take months of planning.

The existing mechanisms of discussion forums (e.g. PM), mailing lists and IRC work better than a meta meetup site and a collection of mail bots.

This looks like fun. Living half way between San Francisco and San Jose means that I could go to either one. But at the moment, there aren't enough signed up for a meeting in either place. Anyone else in a simiar situation?

So I don't get it; when I went there, there were options
for where to meet in Cleveland, from which I figured a Cleveland
monk had already signed up (which did surprise me a little),
but when I signed in, it turns out there are no other Cleveland
monks. So I guess I'll be at Chili's alone :-) But my quesion
is, how do they get those locations? Does meetup.com have
deals with chains to present them as meeting locations? I
don't have have a problem with that, I am just curious.

Scott

Update: OK, I can be a little lazy, but the answer was
pretty easy to find. From their "about meetup.com" page:

How will you make money?

We plan on two main ways: (1) We'll get paid by retailers that have good MEETUP spots
(e.g. cafés, bookstores, big pet stores, restaurants, videogame retailers) to "slot them in"
to Venue Voting. Like any business, these companies will pay to increase traffic and sales.
(Note: We never force a MEETUP to be at a particular venue. MEETUPs only happen at
places that the people vote for.) (2) We'll get paid by users for access to some upcoming,
extra cool features.

Unfortunately selecting Germany offers only two cities, both of which are hundreds of miles away from mine. I briefly pondered signing up under the nearer one, just for community's sake, but there's not much point as I'm very unlikely to be able to attend meetings in Hamburg.. Oh well. :-(